But seriously, Debian is fairly lacking in graphical tools, and I find that it's easier to tell people "Add a line to /etc/fstab" than "Start up the mount point administration tool, which is somewhere in the 400,000,000 things in the menu, add a "mount point" with these settings... and so on.

Actually, to take this one step further, I edit config files directly an just about every system I come across (even Mandriva and Xandros) It's just easier, and it highlights the true flexibility of Linux.

Yet another disadvantage of GUI config tools is that, if you're dependent on them, you're up the proverbial creek if your /etc/X11/xorg.conf gets corrupted.

And, to further drive the point home, (I'll use Gnome apps here, because I hate KDE. But that's totally beside the point) Nearly every Gnome application stores configuration in GConf. The "preferences" dialogs show a miniscule number of options, because the very nature of a graphical interface. So, the ONLY way to get Nautilus not to draw the background (which wreaks havoc with fluxbox) is to edit the gconf files directly (or you could use gconf-editor, but...)

So, the plaintext config files may not be great, but they are aheck of a lot better than the graphical tools.

There's just something wrong with something that looks like an entry to the Obfuscated C Contest, except it breaks the length restriction, especially if it contains /*ermm...*/ embedded in the 22nd line as the only comment visible on my 1600x1200 screen using a 12 pixel font.

Even worse (with the code in question), is that the code would just not work if the comment was chamged, added, removed, or just plain moved.

At least the code worked (I think)... but I have never done anything that bad again.